Introduction

This portfolio explores the albums and singles of Vulfpeck and their members and closely associated acts Theo Katzmann and Woody Goss and collaborative acts Joey Dosik and Cory Wong. Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart is praised as one of the best bassists to emerge in recent years, but that’s not the only reason for this choice. Firstly, Vulfpeck is known for their one-take style of recording and off-beat musical style. Secondly, the band has a few closely associated members that appear on a large section of their music. Finally, the band’s members have their own solo projects which often still feature each other. This allows us to compare the albums of these artists and see what makes their music unique.

The natural groups are the main artist on each album. Though they share a band there are some clear differences in genre, Vulfpeck is primarily funk, Theo Katzman is more slow love songs, Cory Wong has the danceability of pop music.

The albums and singles are a good representation of the artists. They all use Spotify as their primary way of distribution and have at least an album each.

Typical tracks for Vulfpeck are Cory Wong (yes that song is named after another artist in the list, it’s going to be confusing data!) or It Gets Funkier, the latter having the typical funk structure and interaction between instruments. An atypical song would be Theo Katzman’s As the Romans do. Whereas his solo music often has a halftime feel soulful style, this is an up-tempo track, more like what I would personally expect to come from Cory Wong’s repertoire.

It will be interesting to find out what makes each artists music truly theirs, even though they are so closely related and collaborative.

Data Exploration

Column

Valence by artistS

To my surprise, Cory Wong was shown to be the most ‘negative’ out of all four artists.

Tempo vs Dancability


To see where this difference is coming from I looked at some more low-level features such as tempo and mode. This plot gives a good interpretation of some of the differences between the artists.

It Gets Funkier

It Gets Funkier


Description

It Gets Funkier II

It Gets Funkier III

It Gets Funkier IV

Frame 5


Description

Here we compare the different versions of It Gets Funkier.

Despite their seeming similarity, I could not get the dynamic time-warping to show that result clearly.